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That’s how Kathleen Wynne turned the old political joke (“Vote early, vote often”) on its head. Except she wasn’t fooling around.

Long before Canadians settled on Justin Trudeau, well before any prime ministerial honeymoon, Ontario’s premier was an early adopter. And an enthusiastic endorser.

She showed him political love when he was running last, and showered him with praise when he was pulling ahead. Wynne went out on a limb by placing a big bet on the Liberal leader when few others saw his growth potential.

Wynne cheered him on, early on, at a Regent Park rally with a passion that seemed unseemly to critics. And she badmouthed NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair in an un-premier-like way when he was still well-placed to win the election.

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The investment was not only personal but political — Wynne didn’t just stick out her own neck, she loaned out much of her provincial electoral machine: The vast majority of campaign managers for federal Liberal candidates emanated from the party’s provincial wing.

Now, the gamble has paid off. Wynne is the bearer of a monumental IOU.

So too are the Ontarians who voted massively for Trudeau at her behest. They are counting on her to collect in full on their behalf, and fully expecting his new government to deliver.

How big is that political debt? About $11 billion big, if you count the amount that Ottawa collects annually from Ontario taxpayers for distribution everywhere else through equalization and other social transfers for health and education.

But that fiscal imbalance, long an irritant at Queen’s Park, won’t evaporate overnight.

Ontarians have swung massively behind the federal Liberals in the past, only to be taken for granted when it came time for Ottawa to give the country’s biggest province its due. Former prime minister Jean Chrétien won virtually every seat in Ontario yet cheerfully shortchanged the province in the aftermath, because in Canadian politics the squeaky wheel gets the grease — and the squawky provinces get the regional largesse.

The province has long lobbied for an expanded Canada Pension Plan. Thwarted by Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, Wynne campaigned hard in the 2014 provincial election for a new Ontario plan to plug the gap, and is now moving on that mandate.

The common assumption is that an Ontario Retirement Pension Plan would be superseded by an expanded CPP under Trudeau. Not so fast — or more precisely, not fast enough: Ontario’s plan is advancing rapidly, while any CPP expansion remains embryonic. Changes to the national plan require the consent of other provinces; agreeing on how much to scale it up could also prove challenging.

In short, a pan-Canadian pension expansion could prove too little, too late. It’s quite possible that Trudeau will find himself following Ontario’s lead on pension reform, rather than leading the way nationally. His major contribution would be to support Ontario’s recent request to streamline administrative functions — something Harper bizarrely refused to do.

It’s a similar scenario on climate change, pharmacare and child care. Not just Ontario, but Quebec and B.C. have made major gains in these fields. In all these sectors, progress may be measured by how well a new federal government gets along with the provinces — as opposed to getting in their way.

For the first time in a decade, there will be political congruence between Liberal governments in Ottawa and Ontario, and personal chemistry between the prime minister and premier. The new alignment disproves the old axiom that voters deliberately choose different parties in the two different jurisdictions to play them off against each other.

Will Wynne do any better than her predecessors in getting Ontario’s fair share?

She will certainly get a better hearing than she ever got from Harper. After all, the federal Liberals are already familiar with Ontario’s pitch — some of Trudeau’s top aides having crafted it when they worked at Queen’s Park during Dalton McGuinty’s perennial crusades for fiscal fairness.

Ultimately, though, Trudeau’s calculus will be about political interests, not personal loyalties. All the more reason for Wynne to remind him that Ontario holds two IOUs, not just one: First, her personal campaign on his behalf; and second, the critical support he got from voters across the province.

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